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Major oil producers on Thursday refused to accelerate plans to gradually lift oil production each month, raising the potential for the U.S. to take advantage of prices for the commodity, which trade close to multiyear highs.If capital does start to flow back into the oil field and production from non-OPEC countries, which include the U.S., starts to climb again, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and their allies, together known as OPEC+, will “have to make a decision about how to respond,” said Brogan. OPEC+ reaffirmed their previous decision on production levels at a videoconference held Thursday, and said...

When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump. "Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices....But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the...

Congressman Boehner, GOP Committee Leaders Highlight American Energy Production & Infrastructure Jobs Bill Nov 17, 2011 Washington- At a press conference today, Congressman John Boehner (R-West Chester), Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Chairman John Mica (R-FL), Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA), Rep. Steve Stivers (R-OH) and Rep. Tim Murphy (R-PA) announced that House Republicans will soon unveil legislation – the American Jobs & Infrastructure Act – linking expanded American energy production to high-priority infrastructure projects. This bill is another part of the Republican Plan for America’s Job Creators, and will support long-term job creation by removing government barriers to...

Many liberals in the media are expressing shock over Obama’s apparent willingness to increase oil production.  We all know that he is full of …, I mean ethanol, and they do too. Those of you who were befuddled at the news that Obama will ‘expand drilling’ in Alaska are not missing anything.  Obama has pulled this political chicanery a number of times.  Whenever a specific proposal that he so adamantly opposes becomes too popular to ignore, he announces his support for it by promising to implement inconsequential reforms.  To that end, he declared during his Saturday radio address that he...

WASHINGTON - Gas prices are going up. And up. And up. And now, the Energy Department predicts the cost of gasoline this summer will be 40 percent more than last year. In the District of Columbia, the average price of regular unleaded jumped four cents a gallon between Monday and Tuesday. "I think it's all kind of a farce," says driver Kathryn Abate. "Because the oil prices have gone up a little, but not really to the extent that gas prices have. So it's just like a 'predicting' thing which I think is kind of unfair to consumers." The experts...

An Interior Department report to be released Tuesday says more than two-thirds of offshore oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico are sitting idle. According to the report, obtained by The Associated Press, those inactive swaths of the Gulf could potentially hold more than 11 billion barrels of oil and 50 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The report also shows that 45 percent of all onshore oil and gas leases are inactive.

(CNSNews.com) - Richard Newell, administrator of the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), said that while oil prices are likely to stay above average for the remainder of 2011, it is unlikely that an increase in domestic oil production would dramatically affect oil prices in either the short-term or the long-term. Newell, a political appointee, was tapped to head the EIA by President Barack Obama in mid-2009. In his testimony before the House Committee on Natural Resources on Thursday, Newell said that because oil is a global commodity dependent on global trends, domestic production would do little to ease prices at...

Is it really any surprise that oil and gas prices are surging toward the record highs we saw in 2008 just prior to the economic collapse? Despite the President’s strange assertions in his press conference last week, his Administration is not a passive observer to the trends that have inflated oil prices to dangerous levels. His war on domestic oil and gas exploration and production has caused us pain at the pump, endangered our already sluggish economic recovery, and threatened our national security. The evidence of the President’s anti-drilling mentality and his culpability in the high gas prices hurting Americans...

Fortunately for all of us, the wise energy policies of the Obama administration have us well on the way to a sustainable, secure energy future for our nation. After all, who could argue with a policy where we seek to import less oil from abroad, stifle the domestic production of such resources and do nothing to replace the shortfall?With that in mind, surely nobody would expect a result like this.The lack of effective leadership on this vital issue has drawn the ire of a group of conservative leaders who recently provided a summary of just what we can expect in...

Another session of Sunday morning shows came around and I found myself watching Meet the Press. (Something which happens more and more since ABC made the disastrous decision to drop the indispensable Jake Tapper as host of This Week in favor of Christiane Amanpour.) One of the guests was President Obama’s Chief of Staff Bill Daley, and the subject of the discussion turned to the rising prices of both gasoline and barrels of oil. “Aha!” I thought. “Now we’re getting down to something important. The administration has been choking off domestic oil production and the unrest on the Arab street...

For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your LOVE for all the saints, Eph 1:15 All the stops are being pulled to avoid the Obama Depression settling into the discussion. This economic disaster would be tragic if it wasn’t intentional. From the moment he and his radical buddies took over the helm of this great ship of Freedom they have pushed to destroy the capitalistic model and replace it with a communist dictatorship and now we have the results. As gas becomes a scarcer and scarcer commodity everyone will be punished equally...

We are living lives of self-imposed impoverishment. it will reach $130bbl, there is little reason to expect gasoline prices to do anything other than climb higher in the near future.One of the problems we face right now is the uncertainty in Libya, an OPEC nation that has cut its normal daily output of 1.6 million barrels of oil per day (bpd) to just over 700,000, amid the political tensions surrounding Muammar Gaddafi. What this means for humanity as a whole is that there is now less oil on the worldÂ’s market to meet the demand around the globe. What this...

Recovery: While states like Nevada wallow in recession, tiny North Dakota becomes the first state rated as expanding by a leading service. Could it be the state's burgeoning energy industry? The recession — induced by Democrats and activists meddling in the housing market through the Community Reinvestment Act and then whistling past the bad-loan graveyard of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — officially ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. For much of the country, mired in a jobless recovery with job losses so great and prospects so bleak that it will take decades just...

Industry experts say the latest deep water drilling moratorium issued by the White House has only fanned the flames of discontent by oil companies working in the Gulf. One analyst says there are new predictions on how fast the rigs might be pulling out and leaving the Gulf. Brian Petty with the International Association of Drilling Contractors says we should have a good idea of just how many rigs will be lost by Labor Day. According to Petty, the new so-called "softer" moratorium is actually harder on the industry than the first one

Diamond Offshore announced on Friday that it will be the first company to relocate one of its oil rigs from the Gulf of Mexico to Egyptian waters due to the Obama Administration’s ban on drilling. Chron.com reported: Diamond Offshore announced Friday that its Ocean Endeavor drilling rig will leave the Gulf of Mexico and move to Egyptian waters immediately — making it the first to abandon the United States in the wake of the BP oil spill and a ban on deep-water drilling. And the Ocean Endeavor’s exodus probably won’t be the last, according to oil industry officials and Gulf...

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says he will issue a new order imposing a moratorium on deepwater drilling after a federal judge struck down the existing one. Salazar said in a statement Tuesday evening that the new order will contain additional information making clear why the six-month drilling pause was necessary in the wake of the Gulf oil spill.

Washington (CNSNews.com) – A federal judge will rule Wednesday whether to uphold President Barack Obama’s six-month moratorium on offshore drilling, a response to the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Several oil service companies asked a federal judge on Monday to block the U.S. Interior Department from enforcing a six-month moratorium on new deepwater drilling projects in the Gulf of Mexico. The lawsuit filed claims the government arbitrarily imposed the moratorium and suspended drilling at 33 existing exploratory wells without any proof that the operations posed a threat. U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman is scheduled to hear...

One would think that, when it comes to the Gulf spill, our top priorities would be as follows: plug the leak, mitigate and clean up the environmental damage, and provide help to those affected by it. But as President Obama indicated in his Oval Office address last Tuesday night, he sees things quite differently. In his address President Obama found occasion to trumpet his radical cap-and-trade agenda for the nation’s energy sector. He referred approvingly to the disastrous Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, which the House narrowly passed last summer. He sent clear signals that he wants the Senate to pass a...

President Obama has a solution to the Gulf oil spill: $7-a-gallon gas. That's a Harvard University study's estimate of the per-gallon price of the president's global-warming agenda. And Obama made clear this week that this agenda is a part of his plan for addressing the Gulf mess. So what does global-warming legislation have to do with the oil spill? Good question, because such measures wouldn't do a thing to clean up the oil or fix the problems that led to the leak. The answer can be found in Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's now-famous words, "You never want a...

The Obama administration used the names of drilling experts to justify a ban on deep water drilling - despite the fact that 8 of these experts who were listed in the Interior Department report used as a basis for the moratorium say that their names had been used to justify a political decision: When President Obama last month announced his six-month deepwater moratorium, he pointed to an Interior Department report of new "safety" recommendations. That report prominently noted that the recommendations it contained-including the six-month drilling ban-had been "peer-reviewed" by "experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." It also...